Sacred Steps for a Nuclear Free, Peaceful, Just World with Louise Dunlap & Linda Seeley

Hear Louise Dunlap and Linda Seeley, both organizers of SACRED SITES PEACEWALK FOR A NUCLEAR FREE WORLD share their vision, insights, and details of the upcoming walk, which they hope will help to shut down nuclear power plants in California on Thursday, October 20, 2011, from 2 pm to 3 pm (Pacific Time) on Community Currency with Carol Brouillet on the Progressive Radio Network

San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace is helping to organize the SACRED SITES PEACEWALK FOR A NUCLEAR FREE WORLD. They have been working hard to shut down Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power plant, especially in the wake of the disaster of Fukushima. Working with the Mothers are a Japanese Buddhist order and two native American groups dedicated to preserving sacred sites. The Diablo Canyon plant was built, over community protest, on a site sacred to the Chumash people.

Walking for peace, justice, against the nuclear industry is not a new idea, but a powerful tool to raise awareness, build community and draw public attention and support to the important struggles that are far too often ignored by the press. Recently there have been anti-nuclear walks in Australia, France and New England.

The first Wall Street occupation only attracted a handful of people and, I hope that the occupations and walks will continue to attract more and more people and support, as they weave those powerful bonds of love, friendship, support and understanding that nourish powerful social movements.

Louise Dunlap is the author of Undoing the Silence: Tools for Social Change Writing who assists people to make their voices heard in the challenging debates of our times. A longtime advocate for peace and justice, she began her work for social change with the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, and taught at the University of Massachusetts in the 1970s. Later she taught graduate students in policy and development at M.I.T. and eight other graduate schools including three in South Africa. She has shared struggles for justice with activists from many movements, and participated in peace walks on nuclear weapons, climate change, slavery and racism, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay area. She also teaches yoga and Buddhist meditation in the tradition of Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

Linda Seeley is president of the board of directors of Terra Foundation, she began offering workshops in The Work that Reconnects," experiential deep ecology training developed by Joanna Macy, PhD in 2003. Linda has worked closely with Joanna for nine years, and she sees the need in the community for expression of feelings related to the current state of the world and all its inhabitants. Linda is a certified nurse-midwife who has attended over a thousand births in SLO County, she is also the Vice-President of San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and the legal intervenor in the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.

We will explore how the upcoming walk which begins at Diablo Canyon on Saturday, October 22nd and concludes, Sunday, November 6th at Sogorea Te (in Vallejo - after passing through much of the Bay Area including Santa Cruz, San Jose, Livermore, Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond) relates to the other walks, the connections made individually and collectively on a group project like this, and how it is part of a much larger global effort, recognizing the parallels between the anti-nuclear efforts and the occupy movement, and how they can nurture one another. We will look at how creating space and opportunity for dialogue, conversations, people can find their voice, break the silence, reclaim their power, and can turn the tide in Life's favor...

Community Currency is hosted by Carol Brouillet who edited The Invisible Nuclear War - The Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation, The Massive Government Cover-Up and the Continuing Battle Being Waged by the Nuclear Powers Against All Life on Earth in 1993, inspired greatly by the Nuclear Guardianship Project under the leadership of Joanna Macy. All shows are archived on the Progressive Radio Network.